How to Find Company Information

Visual depiction of a BIS Librarian's suggested search strategy for finding company information.

Company & Industry How-to Search YT Playlist

BIS has created a series of YT clips on how to find information on companies using some of the databases mentioned in this guide. They are designed to get you started in determining if the company is public, private, subsidiary, plus ways to compile list of companies within industries. The Industry YT's are how to search for basic industry reports.

Click HEREto go to the BIS Playlist on YT. The clips are very short and will aid you in navigating through these complex databases. Remember that a lot of these reports are not found for free on Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Nexis Uni

Provides full text and summaries of articles from over 40,000 newspapers, magazines, journals, wire services, trade journals, etc., in addition to allowing you to generate lists of companies using criteria that you select.
Articles are available for download, email, print or can be sent directly to Google Docs in a variety of formats including pdf, docx and xlsx.

In order to download articles, make sure to enable pop-ups for advance.lexis.com

To search for company profiles, select the company info box on the home page and select Company Profile from the drop-down to search for a company by name.

Mergent Online

Includes U.S. Company Data and International Company Data. Rich textual descriptions offer a wealth of detail on items including business description, history, property, subsidiaries, officers and directors, long-term debt and capital stock.
(Annual reports for most companies are available back to 1996.)

To find company reports, use the "company search" window on the left side of the home page. You can limit your search to companies in a specific country. Make sure the "International Company Database" box on the left side is checked. Then, click on the "Country" drop-down menu on the right side, select the name, and click search.

Once you have found a company and reached its "company details" page; click the "filings" tab. You will see a table containing details of the company's recent filings. The icons in the "view documents" tab will provide you with various formats for viewing the filings.

If the filing you are looking for is more than 90 days old; you will need to use the EDGAR searchfunction. In the "company search" section; select the Government Filings tab near the top of the page and enter a company name or ticker symbol.

In the "filing date search" section; specify a time frame for your search. Finally; in the "filing type" section; specify what type of filings you are interested in. (Again; Form 10-K is the government-required annual report for publicly-traded companies.)

Mergent Online also has financial ratios. Chad Boenniger at Ohio State has a good video describing how to search the database for individual companies or creating reports which compare ratios of company peers within industries for checking your work when making ratio calculations.

PrivCo

"Business and financial data on major, non-publicly traded corporations, including family owned, private equity owned, venture backed, and international unlisted companies." Contains data on over 650,000 U.S. private companies, over 100,000 private market deals and venture captial fundings, and over 18,000 private market market investors. May search by keyword as well as by industry.

Access is free for University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign users, but you must create an account. Sign up with your university e-mail address from the main page. Once inside, search by company or investor name.

Users can search by Company/Investor name or website in the top search bar

More advanced search options can be found under the Advanced Search heading, which can search private companies, investors, funding, mergers and acquisitions deals and private equity deals, and can be further narrowed down by location, date, industry and other factors.